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  • Published: 1 October 2003
  • ISBN: 9780712667579
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

The Man Who Drew London




A feat of historical reconstruction by a master of the genre, this is a vivid and insightful account of the life of Wenceslaus Hollar, the celebrated illustrator of 17th-century London.

The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings.

Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story.

  • Published: 1 October 2003
  • ISBN: 9780712667579
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $49.99

About the author

Gillian Tindall

Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming ‘Elizabeth’ line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.

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Praise for The Man Who Drew London

Her intention is that fact and fiction should complement each other. They do perfectly

Frances Spalding, Sunday Times

With clarity of purpose and clarity of style, she has written a book that is both elegant and thoughtful

Michael Prodger, Sunday Telegraph

Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history - woven from close research into people and places - that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue

Independent